This is the Blog for William O. Beeman, Professor and Chair of Anthropology and specialist in Middle East Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota, formerly of Brown University. It includes current publications on Middle Eastern affairs, especially Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf region; anthropology; linguistics; performance; opera; things Japanese and Central Asian. Email: wbeeman@umn.edu

Commentary by William O. Beeman: An Israeli tour bus was bombed in Burgas, Bulgaria. Since that time Israel has been trying to demonstrate that Hezbollah and by extension the Iranian government was responsible. Thus far no one has claimed responsibility, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, despite loud proclamations of Hezbollah guilt in the affair has not produced one iota of evidence that Hezbollah was actually involved. Investigator Gareth Porter dissects this matter, concluding that the Israeli claims have no merit.

The Netanyahu claim in interviews on Fox News Sunday and CBS Face the
Nation of “rock solid” intelligence on the bombing was accompanied by
an announcement that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman would
travel to Brussels Monday to meet with EU foreign policy chief Catherine
Ashton and foreign ministers of nine EU member states to persuade them
to put Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organisations.

Netanyahu, who usually emphasises Iran’s role in terrorism, focused primarily on Hezbollah’s alleged culpability.

Unlike the United States, the EU has never officially considered
Hezbollah to be a terrorist organisation, but Netanyahu believes that
pinning the Bulgarian bombing on Hezbollah gives him political leverage
on the EU to change that.

Lieberman was quoted Sunday as saying the bombing in Bulgaria “has changed the way in which Hezbollah is seen”.

For months, Netanyau has been building a case that Iran has been
carrying out a worldwide campaign of terrorism. That narrative is based,
however, on a systematic and highly successful Israeli campaign of
shaping the news coverage of a series of murky allegations about
terrorist actions or efforts in Baku, Tibilisi, Bangkok and Delhi, and
into stories fitting neatly into the overall narrative.

Netanyahu used sweeping language about the alleged intelligence
underlying his charge that Hezbollah carried out the Bulgarian tourist
bombing, but refused to offer any further information to back it up.

In the interview on Fox News Sunday, Netanyahu said, “We know with
absolute certainty, without a shadow of a doubt that this is a Hezbollah
operation….” But despite being asked by interviewer Chris Wallace for
some indication of the nature of the intelligence, he would say only
that information had been shared with “friendly agencies”.

When the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, Tamir Pardo and Yoram Cohen,
briefed the Israeli cabinet Sunday on those agencies’ efforts against
what were described as Iranian and Hezbollah plans for terrorism in more
than 20 countries, they were not reported to have presented hard
intelligence supporting the claim of Hezbollah responsibility for the
Bulgarian bombing.

If the Israeli government did share intelligence information on
Hezbollah and the Bulgarian bombing with the Central Intelligence Agency
as Netanyahu claimed, it did not register with the senior U.S.
officials on Jul. 19.

When a “senior U.S. official” was quoted by the New York Times that
day confirming the Israeli assertion that the bomber who carried out the
operation was “a member of a Hezbollah cell operating in Bulgaria”, he
was apparently merely making assumptions rather than relying on any hard
evidence.
Also on Jul. 19, Pentagon press secretary George Little said, “I
don’t know that anybody has assessed attribution for this cowardly
action….”

On Jul. 20, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the administration
was “not in a position to make a statement about responsibility”.

Netanyahu declared immediately after the news of the Bulgarian bus
bombing Jul. 18 that Iran was responsible for the attack. In support of
the charge, he cited recent alleged terrorist incidents in a number of
other countries. “All the signs lead to Iran,” he said.

But Netanyahu offered no proof, and the Israeli Embassy in Washington
acknowledged to CNN on Jul. 19 that it had no proof that Iran was the
instigator of the attack.

Netanyahu also argued in his Fox News interview as well as in an
appearance on CBS Face the Nation that an Iran/Hezbollah connection to
the bombing of the Israeli tourist bus could be reasonably inferred from
a Hezbollah terrorist plan that had been discovered in Cyprus only a
week earlier.

“The whole world can see who it is,” said Netanyahu on Fox News
Sunday. “You would have known or been able to surmise it from Cyprus a
week ago.” A “Hezbollah operative” in Cyprus was caught planning
“exactly the same attack, exactly the same modus operandi”, he said.
But the case to which Netanyahu referred is much less clear-cut than
his dramatic description. In fact, it is unclear who the alleged
Hezbollah operative really is and what he was actually doing in Cyprus.
The 24-year-old Lebanese man with a Swedish passport was arrested in his
hotel room in Limossol Jul. 7 – just two days after he had arrived in
the country — following an urgent message sent to Cyprus from Israeli
intelligence that the man intended to carry out attacks, according to
Haaretz Jul. 14.

The Israeli press have portrayed the unnamed Lebanese as “collecting
information for a terror attack” being planned by Hezbollah (Israel
Hayom) and as identifying the “vulnerabilities that would allow for
maximal damage among a group of Israeli tourists in their first hours on
Cyprus ” (Ynet News).

But those descriptions may not reflect what the Lebanese man was
actually doing. A senior Cypriot official told Reuters a week after he
was taken into custody, “It is not clear what, or whether, there was a
target in Cyprus.” And other Cypriot authorities were reported by the
Cyprus Mail Jul. 20 and by Associated Press Monday to have said they
believe the man was acting alone.

The Cypriot Greek-language newspaper Phileftheros reported that he
was found with information on tour buses carrying Israeli passengers, a
list of places favoured by Israeli tourists, and flight information on
Israeli airlines that land in Cyprus, suggesting that he planned to
detonate explosives on board a plane or bus.

But despite an intensive search, no indication has been found that the man is linked to any explosives.
A lone individual arrested in his hotel room without any explosives
hardly presents a close parallel to the bus bombing in Burgas. Contrary
to Netanyahu’s breathless description of what happened in Cyprus, the
arrest may turn out to have been an overreaction by Mossad to
unconfirmed information the agency had obtained three months earlier
that someone might be interested in harming Israeli tourists in Cyprus,
reported by Ynet News Jul. 15.

Details that have emerged about the cases of Lebanese and Iranian
citizens arrested at the insistence of Mossad in Thailand in January and
Kenya in June also suggest that sensational press accounts of alleged
terrorist plans by the suspects inspired by the Israelis may have been
highly distorted, and that the individuals arrested may turn out not to
be terrorists at all.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist
specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based
Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in
Afghanistan.